I'm the co-founder and partner of Lux Digital in New York, and the author of "Share This! How You Will Change the World with Social Networking" (Berrett-Koehler, 2010). I'm a consultant to key media and advocacy organizations, and my clients have included The Ford Foundation, The Daily Beast/Newsweek, and Jim Hightower’s Hightower Lowdown. I'm a social media advice contributor for NPR’s flagship news program, “All Things Considered.” I specialize in social media, am a leading expert in women and technology, and am a frequent guest on CNN International, BBC Radio, Fox News and more.

Internet Wars Over Women's Bodies

What happens when creeps post creepy sexual pictures publicly on social websites, link to their real identities, and then someone decides to collect those real identities all in one place? All internet hell breaks loose, apparently.

Reddit adheres deeply to policies protecting speech. This means that while the more vanilla subreddits have a place to live, it also means Reddit has a notorious underbelly where discussions not acceptable in mainstream services go to hang out: racism, misogyny, pedophilia, and more. Right alongside great subreddits about feminism, social justice and kittens. It’s a pretty broad, wild-west frontier of Internet forum-ing.

One subreddit in particular has been at the center of attention recently: /r/creepshots. Creepshots are non-consensual photos, most often of women, taken in public of parts of their bodies. Often those parts that have been unwittingly exposed, but not always. Upskirt shots are perhaps the most famous brand of creepshots. They’ve probably happened since cameras first became portable, but: ubiquity of mobile phones with cameras + anonymous Internet posting = creepshots run wild.

Creepshots open up a can of worms the size of Texas when it comes to sexuality, entitlement, public consumption, and privacy. If women are in public, are they automatically assumed to be on display for the Internet to see? Or to be harassed on the street? Are the people taking and posting creepshots violating the privacy of these women? Do websites that allow creepshots to be shared have any responsibility for the content? If creepshots are banned in one way or another, what implication does that carry for other public photos that may serve good purposes, like documenting a crime?

One woman, fed up with the sense of violation that creepshots create, decided that she’d had enough. She created a Tumblr called Predditors (now removed, Google cached version here), where information about people posting in /r/creepshots was collected and shared. Personal information was made readily available by the creepshot posters themselves, through links in their profiles to other services, such as FacebookFacebook, where they identify themselves. Jezebel wrote about the Tumblr and its anonymous author.

Cue gauntlet thrown and ensuing drama.

Redditors then started an effort to ban links to Gawker Media websites, which owns Jezebel. Moderators of /r/creepshots shut the forum down, and various participants and moderators removed themselves from Reddit. There’s an unsubstantiated report that a Redditor who appeared on the Predditor tumblr was attacked last night. Comments on Tumblr have encouraged other kinds of harassment. The Predditor tumblr has been removed, though it’s unclear if the author removed it, or if Tumblr shut it down. And, in true Interwebs fashion, there’s new, unclear information being shared about the situation about every 15-17 seconds, so it’s pretty tough to get a grasp on where things stand. (Note: I’ll try to keep this post updated, below, as information comes in.)

Let me then take the liberty of sharing some big picture commentary about why any of this matters.

First, creepshots and parallel forms of sexualizing women publicly without their consent is a huge indicator of what we culturally perceive women’s public roles to be. That you have no reasonable expectation of privacy while appearing in public is a given in the United States. But there should be a reasonable expectation of not being exploited or harassed. When women appear in public, our culture considers their bodies passive receptors to whatever judgement or use allows at any moment. We can call them fat, we can harass them on the street, and we can take pictures of them without asking for permission. Kira Cochrane quoted Mary Anne Franks, who sums it up best, in the Guardian:

We’re perfectly fine with women being sexual, as long as they are objects and they’re passive, and we can turn them on, turn them off, download them, delete them, whatever it is. But as soon as it’s women who want to have any kind of exclusionary rights about their intimacy, we hate that. We say, ‘No, we’re going to make a whore out of you’.

Being a woman while in public: a dangerous activity. I was reminded last night in an email conversation about Caitlin Moran’s “broken windows” theory in her book, “How to Be a Woman:”

Just as New York’s Mayor Giuliani once adopted a zero-tolerance policy toward graffiti and broken windows, she argues, we must do the same for these sexist “broken windows.” Why? Because “if we live in a climate where female pubic hair is considered distasteful, or famous and powerful women are constantly pilloried for being too fat or too thin, or badly dressed, then, eventually people start breaking into women, and lighting fires in them.” Moran’s brand of consciousness-raising stresses the importance not just of equality but of politeness and respect.

Second, the spectrum of behavior that creepshots participates in is alarming: it focuses on the non-consensual act as the titillating factor. Again, from Mary Anne Franks:

“What unites creepshots, the Middleton photographs, the revenge porn websites,” says Franks, “is that they all feature the same fetishisation of non-consensual sexual activity with women who either you don’t have any access to, or have been denied future access to. And it’s really this product of rage and entitlement.”

It is that entitlement that spurs so many other misogynist behaviors, online and off. Entitlement to women’s bodies tells us that we have the right to tell women what we think of them on the street, to cover them up when we view their bodies as dangerous, to touch and penetrate them when we have a “good enough” reason. Creepshots are part of that entitlement.

Which brings me to my last point about Redditor’s private information. If folks sharing creepshots believed that what they were doing was somehow not right, wouldn’t they work a little harder to keep their true identities sealed? These are, after all, a nerdy demographic of people. This in no way validates any encouragement of harassment; I’m supporting the accountability factor here, not any kind of perceived vengeance. But the mindset of creepshot sharers is revealed by their willingness to share who they are. They know that there are no repercussions for exploiting women’s bodies publicly in our culture, and they will carry on.

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Updates: [4:34pm ET] Commenter InfiniteJorge dropped me a tip that more creepshot subreddits are available (also noted in a few links in my post), and that the Predditor tumblr blog is back. I visited the link, but it’s password-protected right now. You can send me tips using the little “Email me tips” link in the right sidebar.

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Randy – I feel like you’re talking about a completely different topic. Your response mentions women in Playboy & a friend’s dismay – you’re talking about women who want to be photographed and who have consented to their photos being published (who often times are working with the photographer and know what the end shot will look like).

In the article, the author is discussing creeper shots, which is understood to be shots taken without the authorization or the knowledge of the photo’s subject. With creeper shots, perhaps the person would consent, but the photographer has invaded someone’s privacy by not asking permission.

We’re not talking about pictures of a crowd in a public space. We’re talking about a picture of a select person showing a select part of their body without their knowledge that they have been singled out. Sounds like something a stalker would do.

Often times in one-on-one interviews or where a random person appears in the background, we see faces or whole images blacked out, because either the person asked not to be shown or no permission was granted. This is clearly the accepted practice in our society. What gives anyone the right to publish another person’s picture without his/her permission?

You wrote: “…there should be a reasonable expectation of not being exploited or harassed.”

Next to your article, there’s a link for: Yahoo’s Marissa Mayer Is The ‘Hottest CEO Ever.’ And It’s Great For Business – http://www.forbes.com/sites/meghancasserly/2012/07/17/yahoo-marissa-mayer-hottest-ceo-ever-great-for-business/